Category: 2011

#29 & #30 Tremendous Rowdy & The Tungsten Rhinos Support Crew

Rumors about him abound. Things like at the age of eight, the boy who would be known as Rowdy was already running with raider parties, attacking the precious mineral mining operations of the Kinshasa Asteroid Belt. That’s where it’s said he learned warring. And killing. They say that when the raiders refused to let him leave to start his own faction, he wiped each former ally out one by one, before feeding their ship & any traces of their existence into a black hole.

Give atrocities he still sometimes commits, some would argue that he hasn’t quite reformed as much as just shift allegiances. After a meteoric rise through the ranks, the Colonial Space Marine Commander Rowdy spends most of his days defending some of the same Mining colonies he supposedly used to loot. The rough & ready battalion he commands, nicknamed the Tungsten Rhinos have yet to find a fight they couldn’t finish. A dozen or so of the hardest, meanest men ever to call themselves human. With a leader like Tremendous Rowdy, why would you expect anything less?

What helps them operate at such an efficient level is a good support staff. Nothing’s worse than a hydraulic malfunction with your battle armor. That’s why mechanics like Dom & Hideo (picture) play such a vital role. While they might not have received the same amount of genetic & cybernetic enhancements the Tungsten Rhinos got, they are no less important.

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Tremendous Rowdy was a character I was really looking forward to working on & actually started around the same time as the first character I did this year, the Sentai guy. While I did have to kind of truncate it a bit, I’m pretty happy with him. The support guys were included originally & only became their own character as I started getting down to the wire, I admit.

I’ve got a story involving Rowdy that in a round about way may also tie into my TransModo story. I feel it’s a pretty good framing device by which to tell a space marine story, but the meat of it isn’t ready yet. What I did know is that I was looking to make the head of the unit equal parts badass & scary. And after hearing a lot lately about conflict minerals & general disarray across Africa, I figured this would be best. That & I came up with the name first & figured he’d have to be some crazy warlord like figure.

So that’s 30. I’ll come back & do a sum up thumbnail post shortly, & then do a postmortem on my own blog after that. I just want to thank friends & family for support & kind words & patience. Good job, everyone else as well.